Texture Image Classification Using DWT AlexNet Feature Fusion and Deep Neural Networks

Texture classification is a pivotal task in computer vision, presenting unique challenges due to high inter-class similarity and the sensitivity of structural patterns to scale and illumination changes. While Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and recent Vision Transformers have set performance benchmarks, they often require extensive labeled datasets or struggle to generalize across domains due to an over-reliance on color and shape features. This paper introduces a novel framework that synergizes Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) with deterministic chaotic dynamics. We propose a chaotic contrastive pre-training strategy, where pixel-wise chaotic maps, specifically Logistic, Tent, and Sine maps, act as non-linear data augmentation techniques. These chaotic perturbations, grounded in ergodic theory, force the network to learn topologically robust features by mimicking complex environmental noise and reflectance variations. Furthermore, we introduce an attention-based feature ensemble that fuses high-level semantic representations from a supervised large backbone with low-frequency structural features from a chaos-pretrained tiny encoder. Experimental results on six texture benchmarks (FMD, UMD, KTH-TIPS2-b, DTD, GTOS, and 1200Tex) demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method, outperforming state-of-the-art approaches and achieving promising accuracies on all the analyzed datasets.

An important challenge in texture recognition is the limited amount of data for training frequently found in real-world applications. In computer vision in general, a successful strategy to mitigate this issue is the use of a pretraining stage where the neural network learns to identify relations between parts of the data in a self-supervised manner. A well-established framework in this direction is masked autoencoder. Nevertheless, these models usually rely on computationally intensive architectures, such as vision transformers. In the particular case of texture images, most of the relevant information is compacted within a delimited area around each pixel, which suggests that capturing long-range dependence via the attention mechanism may be unnecessary. Based on that assumption, here we propose a framework where the pretraining model is a convolutional autoencoder. To leverage the rich information conveyed by texture patterns, we employ deep filters coupled with Fisher vector pooling. In this way, we improve the performance of texture recognition without adding significant computational burden. Our approach is compared with several state-of-the-art methods in different texture databases, confirming its potential both in terms of classification accuracy and computational complexity.

Texture recognition remains challenging for modern vision models because discriminative evidence is often carried by higher-order spatial statistics rather than by object shape alone. While Vision Transformers provide strong long-range modeling capacity, their standard object-centric representations do not explicitly expose such statistical structure, which limits texture sensitivity in fine-grained recognition settings. We present HiPerViT, a compact vision-only architecture that injects an explicit second-order statistical prior into a transformer-based recognition pipeline. The method combines global and local image views with a compact bilinear descriptor encoded as a statistical token, and integrates this token with first-order spatial representations through Perceiver-style latent distillation. This design enables direct interaction between spatial tokens and second-order feature co-occurrence statistics, providing the model with explicit access to texture-relevant information without requiring multimodal pretraining or ensemble construction. Across six texture recognition benchmarks, HiPerViT achieves consistent improvements over strong vision-only baselines under the reported evaluation protocols, including gains of +3.05 percentage points on DTD, +10.48 on GTOS-Mobile, and +10.10 on 1200Tex. Beyond benchmark performance, our analyses show that these gains are largely invariant to the backbone depth used to extract second-order statistics and to the ordering of interaction and distillation stages. This pattern suggests that the primary source of improvement is not a specific fusion topology, but the explicit availability of second-order statistical information as a first-class representational signal. These results support explicit statistical tokenization as an effective and robust design principle for texture-centric visual recognition.